The other day I attended a concert with a folk music friend of mine. He had invited some of his “masters”, his musical mentors that had taught him and transmitted to him their heritage. (One can almost talk about transfusion here.)

These mentors were simple old men who had never set foot in a musical academy before. They also couldn’t bow.

Well, of course they could bow, but they hardly did. They were clearly not comfortable with this final stage of the musical act.

Again I was reminded of how sympathetic a certain clumsiness is with musicians. Not musical clumsiness; I don´t want you to sing out of tune or play as if your fingers got mixed up. But taking a bow is not music, it is a learned act, often plastered on to your performance.

It can remind me of a street musician going around with his hat. Now, please give me some money (applause, appreciation).

While we play music, we are in contact with higher worlds; when taking a bow we are dealing with some sort of contract. We become businessmen and -women, computing how much we get for our efforts.

I like a good musician who can´t take a bow, who is somewhat clumsy. You won´t find them on Broadway, of course, not in rock music, ballet, theater or the circus stage.

They are also becoming rare in classical music.

I note how very proficient my colleagues the young pianists have become. Slick, streamlined, all having cool coiffures and really looking the part. Of course they bow with professionalism.

I never learned that at the Musical Academy. Playing well was enough and shy clumsiness no big sin. We were a bit more like village folk musicians back then.

You have misunderstood this totally, says a friend. Bowing is an act of gratitude and deep thankfulness . It is the best way for an artist to say “thank you” — from the heart.

It can be. Just as “What´s up?” or “How do you do?” can be heartfelt wonderings about our status. But I am not convinced, considering how often and how automatically we say those things every day, in the same robotic way.

If things are heartfelt, why are they manifesting in an identical manner? Perhaps because they have been reduced to practiced, mechanical formalities.
I recall a concert with Donovan in Stockholm in the 80s. His way of receiving applause convinced me. Somebody shouted “Bravo!”. Donovan, sitting on a bunch of pillows, calmly answered “Bravo for bravo”. No lapping up of praise, no affected gratefulness or slick showmanship.

Showmanship can be okay; what disturbs me is when artists behave like salesmen or beggars.

I once played some piano duet pieces in concert with Ulf Björlin at a concert. Ulf was no shy wallflower; in some respects he was a (benign) showman.

And it showed…. Simultaneously with the last fortissimo chord of the piece he rose to his feet in an impressive gesture the meaning of which no audience could misunderstand: “Time for applause!” No begging or salesmanship, that, but continental, possibly Gallic (Ulf studied with Nadja Boulanger) showmanship.

Considering what a great musician, composer and not the least person he was, such a gesture did not disturb me.

But our contemporary, all too professional and streamlined bow-taking does disturb me. It indicates that the wave of image management has not only reached the tender bark of classical music, it has almost engulfed it.

Is this the last stand for the printed score? asks Norman Lebrecht in an entry on his page. Will we use regular “analog” music stands, or digital ones (an iPad for example) in the future.

My view on these things have been termed “Luddite” by some, but they are well-considered. They hinge on the question Should classical music follow the fashion and direction of the digital zeitgeist, or not?

For digital it is. And not only digital, but digital-commercial. Fashions come and go and sometimes surface in the most unlikely places. The fashion however of iPhones and iPads is no happenstance; it is firmly grounded in business thinking and commercial interests.

There is Big Money in these machines, meaning that there is also a big budget for advertising, PR and, let’s call a spade a spade, attraction manipulation.

We have collectively become very attracted to these gadgets. They are in some ways elegant, and also extremely multi-functional. My rather simple mobile phone is not just a phone: it is also a timer, calendar, alarm, music player, e-mail reader (a function I don’t use) and last but not least, a camera! Talk about Swiss Army thingy.

Swiss Army thinking, in other words multi-functionality, has been sold to us, and we have bought it with a vengeance. It seems not just like a good idea, but nowadays a perfectly normal idea.

The virtue of old-fashioned, analog single-functionality is not much touted — it belongs to another, different era and there is probably not much money in praising it.

Well, I gladly volunteer to sing a praise or two.

On reflection, it is a great thing that our scissor, when we are about to open a Christmas present, does not invite us to download a new “cool app”, asks us to choose a jingle, or closes down, saying “Your scissor is out of date, please update to v. 3.104”.

It is great that my acoustical piano never gets a virus infection, never needs to charge batteries, never has a problem with PC/ Mac compatibility, and never asks when I am about to close the lid: “Are you sure you want to quit playing?”

It is great that my copy of Cyril Connoly’s “The unquiet Grave” does not contain a hundred other e-books, sitting quietly in the background but somehow still whispering to me the question “Are you SURE you don´t want to read something else from your digital library?”

No, all these tools and instruments have but a single function, and it is well. (Even though the piano can stand in as furniture. My grandmother had a wonderful saying when looking at my Petrof: “Your piano looks like a pregnant donkey!”) One function can be great, even fantastic. But we have been multi-indoctrinated, the younger among us have been practically weened on multi-functionality.

Now what has all this to do with music, and music stands? (I suggest that you read my article “Tweet seats and the misunderstanding of the concert hall” for a fuller background.) Quite a lot. A concert, especially a classical concert is very much a centripetal (meaning concentrated) act and phenomenon. It is not like an internet cafe or a cocktail-party.

In the break, yes, then I mingle away like a party animal, trying to bump into as many friends and strangers as possible. But before and after the break, during the concert itself, I see only concentration — in the conductor, the orchestra, the soloists, and hopefully the listeners.

I would say that a concert hall, apart from the church, is one of the few centripetal spaces left in our modern western society. It would be nice if we could realize this and appreciate it better, since the IT-industry and the vendors and peddlers of iPod, iPads, iPhones and other iProducts, are not going to say anything positive about single-functionality and centripetality. They are in the opposite business.

But we, listeners and lovers of (especially) classical music should not be blind to the virtues of concentration, of just ONE thing happening at a time, of just ONE function.

It is in this light that I am doubtful to the idea of digital music stands. I have as audition pianist on only one occasion played from somebody’s tablet. It was an okay experience, a bit nervous since I feared that my practiced page-turning fingers would slip when “sweeping” pages instead.

But never mind that. The big and important question here is the entrance of a centrifugal, multi-functional battery powered tool into a space that is, and I believe should be, single-functional, centripetal.

Two different impulses and tendencies are clashing here. You might want to call it a meeting, but it is not really a harmonious, concordant meeting but a tug of war, an unequal struggle between old-fashioned single-functionality (very small PR budget, if any) and the zeitgeist sponsored commercial impulse of Swiss Army thinking.

David and Goliath, in a way. Sure, reading the biblical story about these two warriors we all root for young David. But we don’t walk the talk, for in practice it is Goliath (read, the telecom/ computer industry) who wins… regrettably with our help and assistance.

Yes, this is a plea, a plea to follow the loser and to ponder the great (but commercially impossible) virtues of centripetality, concentration and single-functionality.

When we listen to classical music what we get is very much inward-looking, centripetal energies. Let’s keep it that way and be at least wary of bringing in a Swiss Army tool into the concert hall. I don’t even want to think of the possibility of an iPad receiving an e-mail during the concert. The absurd (but very much in harmony with the cultural zeitgeist) idea of Tweet Seats was more than enough.

I say let’s stick with single-function paper.

PS. Perhaps I should say something about Custer’s last stand. It was a massacre.

How did he play? How did she sing? Was their version better than Karajan´s ?

That the “what”, the piece itself, is less often talked about than the “how” (it is never too late to discuss and re-evaluate even “evergreen” classical pieces) shows how much the musical domain, I mean the classical sub-domain, has become a museum, and how important “covers” are in that sphere.

Cover is a word mainly used in popular music, meaning performing and/or recording a song that was originally written and/or performed by somebody else. If I play your song I play a cover.

Covers play different roles in different genres. In pop and rock music the band usually but not always perform their own songs. They are doing the original version, so to say. Others may or may not be interested in covering their song; some pieces are just left alone. I can imagine that many of the Beatles´ songs are fine as they are, with few covers. (I have no statistics though.)

“Cover band” has a weak ring to it, like you can´t even write songs of your own. This is sometimes unfair: Three Dog Night was a great cover band, adding new values to existing songs.

But what would a “classical original” be? We have no recording of Beethoven playing his sonatas, nor of Liszt nor Chopin. Stravinsky recorded many of his pieces and I do not think they are regarded with much respect.

So what do I mean with classical covers?

I mean existing, well know pieces that are being played and recorded over and over and over again. New recordings of Beethoven symphonies, Chopin Etudes, another Ring, not to mention all the standard piano concertos (Schumann, Grieg, Tchaikovsky, etc.) .

There is of course a first time for everything, and the first time can be fabulous. I don´t begrudge anybody the experience of discovering the Schumann concerto, as fresh as a drop of spring rain. But do we need hundreds of recordings of it?

What do you mean “need”? People like to play it, why not just let them!

Sure, let them play the Schumann concerto. But perhaps we should admit, at least when taking a bird´s-eye, “domainological” view [comparing different domains and sub-domains], that all these recordings of the selfsame classical pieces, somewhere between 50 and 100 is my guess, throws a not very flattering light on the classical sub-domain.

It hardly possible to imagine youngsters of today listening to covers of “Yesterday” and “Yellow Mellow” all the time. Those songs are just a few decades old, while the usual classical program mainly consists of music several hundreds years old!

Isn´t it somewhat tedious listening to the same pieces all the time? Sure, the joys of recognition and all that, but what about the panic of recognition, the terror of repetition and reiteration?

“Oh no, not you again…!!”

The classical sub-domain has become all minimalism. Not in the sense of playing the same tones but the same pieces all the time, with few and slight variations. We are trapped in an opera by Philip Glass…

So what has all this to do with the “how”, you might ask.

My answer: When you live in the merry-go-round of playing and hearing the same 50-100 pieces all the time you obviously get a little bored (but don´t you admit it). You know the g-minor Ballade (Chopin) by heart, you have heard it countless times with countless pianists. The question “what kind of piece is it, what is its identity?” is no longer relevant.

You don´t hear the piece any more, you just hear the version, the interpretation. You become a difference-listener, a comparer, only looking out for variations between different recordings. The question “what” is left behind and you are now stuck in the predictable, spiral world of “how” (was his version / did he sing / did the choir compare with the other choir?).

While in the spheres of pop, rock, etc. new songs are written all the time (perhaps not on the level of Beatles, but still), while in jazz new sensations are served, we in the classical field are adjusting our dress and tie to attend another concert with another Beethoven´s “Ninth”.